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Thursday, 14 August 2014

Creams - Kingston

We headed into Creams in Kingston with more than a hint of trepidation. Over the past few days a couple of people I know had visited it and I'd heard very mixed reviews. Its' Facebook page alone is testament to that, but we thought given that Kingston is up the road from where I grew up and lived for the first 23 years of my life, it was only fair to try it out. Walking into it didn't make me feel too much better in all honesty. Although the ice cream cabinet is impressive, with 36 flavours including five or six sorbets and a low fat frozen yoghurt, the interior seems to be confused about whether it's an ice cream parlour or a club! It's incredibly dark and the booths are all designed so that you can't see anybody else aside from the people you're with. The music was fairly loud and there was a random mirrorball hanging in the front of the shop!

That said, we were greeted pretty quickly by a smiley, friendly guy who gave us the extensive menu and

explained how to go about ordering and was also very accommodating of our request to sit at the front so as not to block the gangway with our pushchair. However, there was a family who came in immediately behind us and waited at the 'please wait here to be seated' sign for at least five minutes while the three or four members of staff on duty all studiously ignored them. Eventually they seated themselves, only to be immediately moved once they'd sat down, so although our experience of the customer service was pretty positive, we could see how it wasn't for everyone.

Despite the impressive selection of ice creams on offer, the menu seemed heavily focused on sauces and toppings and all the trimmings rather than the actual ice cream itself which made it feel a bit gimmicky to me. In the end we pretty much ignored the selection of sundaes, milkshakes, waffles, and crepes and opted for a four scoop cup of just ice cream so we could taste the flavours properly.

The price was good at less than £5 for 4 decent sized scoops of ice cream, and the flavours we opted for were varied. We picked a banana sorbet (to get some fruit in there for our elder son!) which was very good and in fact tasted more like ice cream than any sorbet I've ever had, salted caramel which was incredibly salty and generally didn't stand up too well against the other salted caramel ice creams we've tasted recently, Maltesers, which pretty much just tasted like cold Maltesers and not really ice cream at all, and milk chocolate, which was OK.

We've come to the conclusion that Creams is a big disappointment. It has the potential to be an incredible chain of ice cream parlours (as you can see from there website they have franchises all over London and are opening further branches all over the country in the future months), but the simple fact is there ice cream is nothing amazing. It is a case of Quantity over Quality and as an ice cream lover that is a truly awful thing to state.